Transit Format

Transit is a data interchange format and set of libraries designed for reliably conveying structured values (with types) between applications written in different programming languages. The “transit-format” repository defines the specification of the format (tagging, extension, encoding rules) independent of any implementation. It builds on top of JSON and MessagePack (where possible) to reuse their performance and parsing infrastructure, but adds a tagging/extension mechanism to support types not natively representable (e.g., dates, sets). Transit provides a set of basic elements and a set of extension elements for representing typed values. The extension mechanism is open, allowing programs using Transit to add new elements specific to their needs. Users of data formats without such facilities must rely on either schemas, conventions, or context to convey elements not included in the base set, making application code much more complex.